Barriers to Social Procurement: an evidence in Italy

Social procurement is a practice employed by public entities and private organizations to create a positive social impact together with the primary purchasing objective. The actor that supplies such services is embodied by a particular form of social enterprise, the type B social cooperative, which pursues financial sustainability to keep its mission of helping people with varied typologies of social disadvantage on going. Several challenges hinder the proper employment of social procurement and they differ in relation to the actor taken into consideration. While prior studies have delved into such barriers from the procurers¿ point of view, limited research has achieved to capture the perspective of the supply side. The purpose of this thesis is to address this gap using an exploratory approach incorporating qualitative interviews proposed to the type B social cooperatives operating within the province of Turin, Italy. The findings contribute to shed light on how the barriers to social procurement directly and indirectly hinder type B social cooperatives from maximising their social impact. Therefore, results can provide some insights for possible solutions, including the one proposed by this thesis which regards the involvement of an intermediary actor.